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The Great Divide | 121 done by the government, which we do not voluntarily invite—or want. We willingly waive our privacy for corporations but not for governments. What the public might not fully realize, however, is that the gov- ernment can access all the personal information in the databases of private companies if it issues a subpoena or search warrant, which it does often. As Snowden himself pointed out, “If Facebook is going to hand over all of your messages, all of your wall posts, all of your private photos, all of your private details from their server, the gov- ernment has no need to intercept all of the communications that con- stitute those private records.” These Internet companies, even if they are only interested in exploiting the data for their own profit, cannot refuse to share this information with the NSA, the FBI, and other government agencies if they have a subpoena or search warrant. That reality became evident to me in my investigation of the rape charges brought (and subsequently dropped) against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in 2011. Immediately after his arrest, Cyrus Vance Jr, the dis- ) trict attorney of New York County, issued a subpoena for Strauss- ® Kahn’s cell phone records, credit card records, hotel room electronic key records, e-mails, room service bills, and the CCTV videos of his activities (some of which I published in my article about the case in The New York Review of Books). Nor is this access uncommon. According to Vance in 2016, his office issues thousands of such sub- poenas every year. Even though Apple made headlines by refusing to comply with a court order to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of a dead mass murderer in 2016, it had complied with many previous subpoenas. In fact, in 2015 alone, it quietly provided the backed-up data of some seventy-one hundred iPhone customers to government authorities. If anyone doubts the pervasiveness of government data collection, consider a little-known government agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Created in 2010 by Congress, it mines data on a monthly basis from some 600 million personal credit card accounts, targeting about 95 percent of the credit card users in the United States. In addition, through eleven other data-mining pro- grams, it gathers data on everything from private home mortgages | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 121 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019609